Tyranny and Leadership

“How to spot a Tyrant” was very interesting, more interesting than what I thought it’d be. At the beginning of the show, when Dr. Paul Woodruff was speaking he said that “Tyrants are people who have power and they let it get to their heads.” When I heard this, I could think of several individuals who have fallen into tyranny. A couple minutes later he gave us examples of people that can be tyrants and it surprised me that tyranny is still around. It’s like saying that slavery is still around in the United States. Our country is known as a free country, but according to Woodruff, “Freedom is the absence of tyranny” so are we really free? When we think about tyrants we think about Hitler or Fidel Castro, but Woodruff and the actors gave us an example of tyranny in Shakespeare’s plays.

Tyranny is caused by leadership. In Covey’s book, he says “Distrust of leadership is the best defense of democracy, as Greek popular speakers understood.” What he is attempting to say is that monarchy was created to avoid democracy. Cover also speaks of people who “feel victimized” (pg. 43) and they “focus on the weaknesses of other people and the circumstances that they feel are responsible for their own stagnant situation” (pg. 43). In the three scenes of the three plays that we watched, it was effortless to notice the three symptoms of tyranny that the villain characters had. These three symptoms are hubris (over winning pride), lawlessness (they believe that they can get away with anything), and fear (they’re always afraid of being attacked somehow so they frighten others to protect themselves).

When Creon and his son are altercating about killing the girl Creon’s son loves, Creon feels threatened. During the argument he says that people should obey him in order to avoid being punished. Fear is obvious in this scene. In the second play, Measure for Measure Angelo asks Isabella to have sexual relations with him in order to save his brother from being killed. When Isabella tells him that she will tell on him, he says that nobody will believe her and that he is the “recording voice of law”. Lawlessness is easy to spot since Angelo thinks that he can get away with having sexual relations outside or marriage and punishing somebody for doing it. In the last play, A Doll’s House, Nora’s husband’s hubris isn’t as easy to spot because he’s a loving father and husband. When he finds out about Nora’s loan, he gets mad because he’s afraid of what others will think or say. He doesn’t take in mind his wife’s intentions to save his life. He has too much pride to accept that his wife did the right thing.

All these villains have all the symptoms, but those specifically stood out the most to me in the plays. Another thing that I noticed is that Woodruff is right, “leadership and tyranny always [do] come together.” Creon was the ruler of the city, Angelo was the king and Nora’s husband was the leader of the family simply by being the man of the family. They’re all given a leadership role and they all abuse it. In page 240 Covey speaks of how individuals sometimes are too into themselves and they forget about what others think or what others have to say. He says, “We’re filled with our own rightness, our own autobiography” (pg. 240). This quote can apply to all of these tyrants because they were all selfish and they lack empathic listening. According to Covey, empathic listening is to listen to people and try to understand them. The tyrants hear the other people talk to them, but they’re not really listening.

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